I Published 200 Posts in 5 Weeks: Here Is What Search Console Showed

Between mid-September and early October 2026, DigitalRadar published about 200 posts in five weeks — roughly six a day, across every technology category. This post opens the site’s Search Console and shows, unfiltered, what that volume produced.

The short version: 6 clicks.

The numbers, for the three months ending October 17

Metric	Value
Total clicks	6
Total impressions	905
Average CTR	0.7%
Average position	10.5

Some context: the domain was not born in September. The Search Console property had existed since earlier in the year, with a handful of pages and essentially no traffic. What started in September was production at volume.

What I expected — and what the chart showed

The expectation was the curve everyone describes: publish a lot, Google indexes gradually, impressions climb like a staircase. What happened was different.

The impressions line hugs zero until mid-September. It starts rising around the 19th, shoots to a peak of roughly 240 impressions in a single day, around September 26 — and collapses immediately after, returning to a low baseline with two small ripples on October 3 and 10.

That single peak accounts for more than a quarter of all impressions in the quarter. That is not growth: it is a test.

This is how Google tends to behave with new content at volume. It puts the pages into circulation to see what happens — impressions rise — and if user behaviour does not confirm relevance, it pulls back. The decline after the peak is the part nobody screenshots.

The most important number is not traffic

The indexing report makes the picture clearer:

Status	Pages
Indexed	130
Discovered — currently not indexed	71
Crawled — currently not indexed	13
Total known to Google	214

That is a 61% indexing rate. But the number that matters is the 71.

“Discovered — currently not indexed” means Google knows the URL and chose not to spend resources on it. It never even crawled it. That differs from “Crawled — currently not indexed”, where it read the page and decided against including it. Both are judgments, but the first is harsher: the page was dismissed before being read, based on the context it appeared in.

And 71 pages in that state, on a site that just published 200, say one thing: Google understood the batch as a batch. It saw two hundred new URLs appear at once on a domain with no track record and applied its doubt to the set, not to each page.

Why volume does not work on a new domain

The logic behind this is budget. Crawling and indexing cost Google money, and how much it spends on a site depends on accumulated trust. A new site has a small budget.

When two hundred URLs arrive at once, three things happen simultaneously:

• The crawl budget runs out before covering everything — hence the 71 “discovered” pages that were never read.
• The pages compete with each other. Two posts about the same launch split the signal instead of compounding it.
• The publishing pattern — six a day, every day, identical structure — is exactly the signature Google’s spam policy describes as scaled content abuse.

The 10.5 average position confirms it: the pages that did get in are hovering at the end of page one and the start of page two. Position 10 earns almost no clicks, which is why CTR sits at 0.7%.

What I changed after looking at these numbers

Three decisions, all counterintuitive if you believe in volume:

1. I unpublished 28 posts. The weekly roundups that only re-aggregated the site’s own content, one duplicated story and the posts covered better elsewhere. Fewer pages competing for the same budget.
2. I cut the pace to one or two posts a day, spread over time instead of batched.
3. I started requiring first-party data in every post — a test, a measurement, local reporting. This post is an example: the numbers here exist nowhere else.

It is too early to say what that produces. I will come back with the numbers in December, with the same honesty — including if nothing improved.

How to read this in your own Search Console

If you publish at volume, three reports are worth more than any SEO tool’s score:

1. Indexing → Pages not indexed. If “Discovered — currently not indexed” is a large slice, stop publishing and improve what exists. More pages will not get indexed if the current ones were not.
2. Performance → impressions per day, 3-month window. Look for isolated spikes followed by decline. Real growth is a staircase, not a spike.
3. Average position per page. Pages between 8 and 15 are close to earning clicks. Those deserve improvement before any new post.

Frequently asked questions

What does “Discovered — currently not indexed” mean?

Google knows the URL but chose not to crawl it right now. It usually indicates an exhausted crawl budget or low priority assigned to the site as a whole.

And “Crawled — currently not indexed”?

Google read the page and decided not to include it in the index. Here the judgment is about the content itself, not the site’s priority.

Does publishing a lot speed up indexing for a new site?

Based on this case, no. Of 214 known pages, 84 were left out — 71 of them never even crawled, after a five-week batch.

How long until a new site gets search traffic?

There is no guaranteed number, and be suspicious of anyone offering one. What this data shows is the opposite of the usual promise: three months, 200 posts, six clicks.

At DigitalRadar, we publish our own numbers, including the bad ones. Stay on the radar.